DotSpots Catches Google's Eye at TechCrunch50

One of the best startups launching at TechCrunch50 is DotSpots, a crowdsourcing startup that encourages bloggers to collaborate on getting the news straight by annotating text content with comments, links, YouTube videos and Flickr photos. Imagine this on Google News. Google's Marissa Mayer might be doing so; as a member of the judges' panel, she applauded the idea.

SAN FRANCISCO-I just finished
roaming the Demo Pit here at TechCrunch50 at the San Francisco Design Center
Concourse.

My impression of all these new Web 2.0 technologies is that a lot of these
products would be fantastic as part of a larger portfolio in the arms of a
Google, Yahoo, MySpace or Facebook. Pick your Internet company.

One company that stood out to me was DotSpots, which provides a universal annotation system that
lets consumers annotate news articles and other text content with videos from
YouTube or photos from Flickr and links.

The software then uses semantic matching technology to distribute each
contribution to every instance of that meme across the Web.
DotSpots co-founder Farhad Mohit, who made his bones as the founder of first
BizRate.com and then Shopzilla, showed me a cool demo involving a syndicated
Associated Press story on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The thing about wire news services, Mohit argued, is that they try to
distribute content to as many news outlets as they can to make money. But
readers are stuck with a one-dimensional view of the reporting.

"Mainstream news is not evil," Mohit said. "What they are is
they're lacking resources to cover all the stories that matter in the
ever-shrinking global landscape. The depth is coming from the blogs."

With DotSpots, YouTube contributors, bloggers or just plain citizen journalists
can add comments, videos, photos or other content to news stories to offer a
more rounded view of an event.

In a model Mohit describes as "Annotate locally, distribute
globally," this user-generated content then gets pushed out to all of the
similar pieces of content on the Web so the whole world, or at least anyone who
comes across the content, can see it. The content shows up as a little
annotation tag wherever the poster decides to put it in a story.